shepp

^ God, next you'll tell me there were no Weapons of Mass Destruction. Is nothing sacred??

Yeah, well, criticizing parks is intrinsic to coaster sites, isn't it? If I had a penny for every times SF has been criticized...I could afford to go to WDW. Epcot is actually an interesting example. Even granting that companies should pass through the cost of all improvements and investments rather than approaching them as part of the cost of doing (hopefully increased) business (in that case, you'd spend a LOT more to see Lord of the Rings than Sideways), there's a pretty big consensus out there that many of Epcot's changes didn't add much value to the parkgoing experience. I'm no great fan of TT, and though I really liked M:S, when I went, it was a total walk-on. And I doubt that many people would have celebrated paying jacked-up ticket prices for the abortive Imagination re-do, or the Ellenizing of Energy. Sure, supply and demand is king. And this year, when the Bushized plummet of the dollar is drawing increased foreign visitors to the US and fewer Americans can afford to vacation abroad, I bet WDW sees a nice spike in attendance. It's just that when WDW is raising prices at 500% of inflation, I can't get too excercised if a couple of people sneak into the parking lot, even though it's "wrong."

So does anyone know if BGW still has the "If it rains, you get the next day free" policy? Anyone taken advantage of it? Just how rainy does it have to be?

Hey...since we're on the subject... With all due respect, junior... I'm a lot older than you, and have some historical perspective on this matter. The only reason you, dude, have whatever rights you do (and in Georgia, it's not many) is because other queers went out and protested and bitched...and organized. A mere decade ago, a gay man could have been sent to prison for 20 years for having consensual sex in your great state. In Georgia, you can legally be fired from a job for being queer. You can be thrown out of your aprtment. If you should be lucky enough to settle down with a partner, your state will not recognize the relationship. You're a second-class citizen, and it's not because people were annoyed by being handed cards on the Day of Silence... I mean, I know you're only 16 and cool and like coasters and stuff. But I doubt you know jack about queer history, or have done any political work, and okay, that's fine. But please don't start giving know-it-all attitude about people who've fought, sometimes at great personal cost, for your rights. Here in California, queers do have the right to a job and a place to live and some partnership rights, and believe me, it's not because our straight classmates thought we were "pretty cool." No, not every straight person is going to like or accept me. (Though acceptance is, certainly, growing.) But straight society is gonna grant me equal rights, or else I, and other queers, are gonna fight for them. I guess you live at Mom and Dad's and don't yet have to support yourself and don't have a partner to care for, so maybe you think the issue comes down to being liked in high school. But it's a bigger fight than that, and, really, you're not above it. Love, Shepp

Hey, I think there should be a Day of Bitching for envious straight dudes who can't get laid without having, in one way or another, to pay for it. But that's just me... And anyway, I thought we queers are so rich and powerful that we secretly rule the world. Or is that the Jews? Edit: hey, it's my 69th post and it's about having sex!

Well, which would you rather soar over: Yosemite, Mount Whitney, and Big Sur, or Lake Okeechobee, a pancake-flat coast filled with high-rise hotels, and the strip malls on International Drive? And I'm curious: what's perceptibly cheapie about M:S?

^ Hey, no reason to get in a snit. As far as going elsewhere, the Orlando drill goes like this: WDW announces a price hike and, hey presto, Uni and Busch promptly follow suit, almost to the penny. In the old days, that would be known as "price fixing," I b'lieve. Sure, supply and demand is at work here. WDW will charge whatever it can get away with. That (and, apparently, waging war under false pretexts) is What America Is All About. Still, during the post-9/11 attendance slump, did WDW slash its prices? Ummm... No, they raised them, no doubt to compensate for dropping attendance. And it's no secret that WDW runs its property as a private fiefdom, and curries local favor with a variety of price breaks for Floridians Yes, the parks have bailed Disney out of many a movie misstep. But when a park raises its price at twice (or, in the last year FIVE TIMES) the rate of inflation, and when that inflation rate is itself skewed by drug-price robbery, one is, in fact, entitled to wonder just when The Happiest Place on Earth became One of the Greediest...

"Goodbye, Michael Eisner"?

So what's the story with Chik-fil-As? Never heard of them till just now. Is their slogan "Kill a cock for Christ" or something? And hey, I'm headed for PKD and BGW fully aware that many Southerneers are "extremely biased" toward me, as Virginia has the most restrictive anti-same-sex-marriage and anti-domestic-partnership law in the USA. Virginia is for straight lovers, apparently.

^ Back when I visited Freedomland, you had to carry a spear to fend off the wooly mammoths.

Yeah, gotta love the zero-G on the Hulk...and everything that goes with it. Just thinking about it makes me happy.

Yes, but... In 2004, the USA experienced inflation of less than 3%. Since March of last year, the price of a one-day WDW ticket is up by around 15%. To quote an Orlando Sentinel article from over a year ago, "Since 1989, the average price of goods and services purchased by Americans has increased 48 percent, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. In that same period, Disney tickets have gone up 96 percent, a Sentinel analysis shows. If Disney's ticket increases had matched inflation since 1989, a one-day admission would cost $42.05 today." Today, subsequent to two price hikes, that disparity would be even more striking, i.e., an inflation-adjusted ticket would cost about $43.25, not 60 bucks. Multiply 17 dollars by 15 million visitors a year, and you run into some serious money, surely enough to buy a parking-lot tram or two. Hey, is WDW run by some pharmaceutical company?

I think it's aso a matter of technology. Once someone's ridden DL's Haunted Mansion, how thrilled is he going to be with a local park's cheesy spook ride featuring papier mache skeletons and bad special effects? And while darks may be appealing to a wide variety of people, they do have a limited rerideability factor, unless they're truly amazing, like Spidey. The 2 closed CP rides actually came from Freedomland, a defunct early '60s park in the Bronx. It may be an invention on my part, but I remember being disapponted by their Earthquake ride even way back then, and that was wayyyy before Universal Studios trashed BART every ten miinutes. So the traditional dark ride has now been largely supplanted in most parks by motion simulators, which provide many of the attractions of the dark ride - motion, plotline (more or less), startling effects - in a form that's cheaper, takes less maintenance, and can easily be updated. There are also interactive darks like Men In Black. And since the golden era of dark rides, there's been a rise in combo attractions, heavily themed incorporating conventional thrill ride elements, like ROTM, PKI's Tomb Raider, or even DD, whose queue area is considerably more amazing than many classic darks. And economically, it probably makes more sense for a family-oriented park like BGW to invest in a mega-dark (Curse of Darkcastle) than for a coaster park like CP to keep indoor rides that were 40 years past their prime.

^ However, you'll note that the MSN Webpage unjder discussion uses the two terms interchageably.

Hell, my partner and I would love to head south and ride X and Goliath again, but the plans are set: we'll be en route between SFGAdv and BGW that day...

Okay, what is it with the constant anti-KK carping? It's not like TTD's cars are the most amazing-looking things in the world either, especially since they took off the dragster wheels. (Hey, since the wheels were removed because they were a drag on the trains, could the missing last row be a matter of weight and dynamics? OK, just a thought...) But the rest of TTD's theming (or XCelerator's, for that matter) is pretty damn minimal. Oooh, flags and bleachers! Is it because KK is SF and not CF, or what?

^ I've been to Hallowee'en Horror Nights a few years, and yes, it's great. Definitely hardcore...last year an actor spewed fake vomit on my feet... It's not included in the genral entrance fee. You should buy a Stay and Scream ticket, which costs less than HHN general admission, enables you to stay in the park while all the non-HHN people leave, and lets you get a head start on the haunted houses. You can buy them in advance, or, I think, in the park for the same night, but there's a limited supply, and the closer you get to Hallowe'en, the more likely they are to sell out. October's a great time to go the Florida parks...good weather and usually uncrowded. But the earlier in the month you go to the Hallowe'en events, the happier you'll be.

Twelve bucks??? That's harsh...and I noticed they (tastefully) haven't posted the parking charge on the Website. SF seems to have this "offer discounted tickets, cheap SPs, then soak 'em with incidentals" policy. Since I'll be using my $55 SFMW pass to get into GAdv, that means the two of us will be spending 6 bucks apiece to get into the park, which seems like a pretty good deal.

Holy crap! Even for yet another stupid top 10 list, that one's egregiously stupid. Camp Snoopy? Did that ever make a top 10 list before? Okay, maybe Top Ten Kiddie Parks Located Inside a Midwestern Megamall... I know when I was at the Mall of America, I was thinking "The hell with Spiderman, Dueling Dragons, and the Hulk. This place rocks!" Interestingly, Hersheypark is on their list of Top 10 Family Adventures, but not on the park list. And the Mall of America handily aced out Yosemite and the Grand Canyon as a family adventure, too. Oh well, what can you expect from the company that invented Windows?

You could always go to the all-you-can-eat pizza buffet near the causeway and gorge yourself to the point of nausea. Worked for me.

^ Granted, the WDW parking fee is on the low end. Six Flags parks routinely charge a couple of bucks more, and Universal charges $9, though that includes free access to miles and miles of moving sidewalks. However, that's sorta offset by the relative scarcity of discounts on WDW admissions (especially compared to Six Flags, where you'd have to be a fool to pay full price). And WDW has raised prices at will, the other majors following suit, at least once a year. Since 2001, the price of a single day's one-park ticket has risen by a bit over 30%, almost 4 times the inflation rate. Aww, poor Disney. Yes, parking lot upkeep and taxes cost money. Same goes for Costco and your local mall and the multiplex and the bowling alley down the street, as well, and you don't pay 8-10 bucks to park there. When a car goes to a theme park, unless it's full of season passholders it guarantees there's gonna be revenue for the park: at least $30 (one radically discounted SF admission), more often, as in the case of WDW, several hundred dollars, maybe even more. When your mall provides free parking, there's no certainty you're going to spend a dime there. Which leaves the trams. WDW's attendance is about 15 million a year. Generously assuming 4 passengers per car, that means the parking gate rakes in 30 million bucks per annum...which pays for a lot of trams. One thing about me: I'm kinda spoiled. I ride a motorcycle, and the absolute maximum rate I pay for a metered space (free on Sundays) in overpriced downtown San Francisco for a day's parking is $2.50, 1/4 of what I pay at SFMW. btw, I originally wrote "pubic transit" in my last post. Which just goes to show where my mind is....

^ The Right Thing, huh? WDW has no problem raising its admission prices regularly and eternally, at a rate pretty consistently higher than the rate of inflation. So do many other theme parks. And, though most businesses, except those in the middle of a city, provide free parking for their customers, parks slap 8 to 10 dollar surcharges on people who will then spend a lot more money at the parks. I suppose one could make an ecological argument for discouraging people to drive, but the public transit possibilities at most parks are pretty bleak. So parks charge 10 bucks to park (and 3 bucks for a 25-cent bottle of water) because they can. It's not about services - most parking lots are unguarded patches of asphalt. It's about profit. Is it wrong to sneak into a parking lot? Well, yeah, of course. Does it make me feel all warm and cosy to know I'm paying a corporation an arbitrary parking fee? Um...no.

I confess: love the PSB and Erasure, too. Bummed because Erasure's San Francisco's shows sold out in an instant. And sorry, Dennis, but Lauderdale stillhas a ways to go before it has the queer heft of Sodom-by-the-Bay.

I've had several pairs. Totally cute. Loved how thy liked to unroll toilet paper and stick thir noses in my ears and mouth...only thing wrong with them was they died too damn soon.

^ No thanks. I watch The Wire....